Conversion is the St Grial in every company. So, as designers, we have to demonstrate how our designs improve the conversion.
What’s is conversion about?
Imagine a funnel. A specific number (X) enters the wide end and that number is modified inside the funnel until another number (Y) comes out of the small end. The conversion is the percentage of X that comes out the small end.
For example, in the case of our guestapp, one of the funnels we analyse is related to the people who start de online check-in process and how many finish the process with their registration (in this case, the conversion is 38,52%):
Traffic > Clients
I like to say unique funnel, to the one who convert traffic into clients. So, we measure the number of new users we receive in our website and how many of those users are converted into clients.
Depending on the type and complexity of the company, that single funnel should be broken down into other sub-funnels to address improvements individually.
So for example, at Chekin, we divide the unique funnel into 3 sub-funnels:
Funnel 01: From traffic to lead
How many new users who enter our website show interest by leaving their email addresses, becoming a lead. The users can leave their email in the register form, bot, contact sales, more forms...
Funnel 02: From lead to trial
What number of leads finish the registration process and start the 7 days free trial.
Funnel 03: From trial to client
What number of users who started the trial, finish it and become customers through an active subscription.
So first, we have to measure the different funnel properly and once we have collected that data, we plan to attack each funnel by designing and proposing some changes that could improve that data.
Once the design is ready, we set-up A/B tests to understand, with real users, if our proposal improve the conversion or not.
If it does, we can then open that design to everyone, with the certain that it will improve the experience.
In the past, we designed what we liked, what we saw as beautiful from our point of view. But in a monitored world, we can take advantage of A/B testing tools to understand if our designs, even if we love them, really improve the conversion of the company or on the contrary, they worsen it.
Many times we get surprises, because what we think is better is not what users prefer. And at the end of the day, the user rules!
This does not mean that we should kill creativity at all. The other way around. Let's propose creative ideas and show that those ideas, well implemented, improve conversion. At first it's a bit difficult, but like everything, with training, our concept of design changes completely...
…for the better, obviously.
Thanks for reading!